Ulduar and Excessive Awesome

Tonight I did Ulduar for my second time and my firs time in a fresh instance. It was a lot of fun.

Flame Leviathan
I was on a motorcycle for this fight.

The gauntlet was the most fun I've ever had on trash. That's not saying much. The gauntlet was more fun than most boss fights I've done. It's a frantic mess with fires everywhere and smoke and motorcycles zooming all around.

The fight itself is less crazy, but just as much fun. As a motorcyclist I had to use a speed boost to get way ahead of the boss and drop tar where I thought he'd pass. Since I was new I tended to get hit by his frontal attack a bit too often. Still, it was a lot of fun. It took us two attempts. Overall I think he's pretty easy, though my guild had already killed him the week before, so it's not as if we were totally new.

Razorscale
We died on... it, a few times last night. It's a very fun fight. There are adds all over the place which the tanks have to pick up and DPS have to kill. Unfortunately for me consecration and divine storm seemed to put out more aggro than tanks could handle. Focusing more on one target didn't work much better. This surprised me since there is a significant body of evidence and even fake quotes which demonstrate that tank aggro in balanced around being disconnected.

Tonight I was ret again for the first few attempts. They were of variable quality. Overall there seemed to be issues with the fire being hot, which hopefully will be fixed sometime.

After a few attempts I was switched to prot. Switching bugged my talents, leaving me with part of my ret spec. Now my prot spec is a mess and my ret spec is incomplete, and also a mess. I still need new glyphs. I'm bad. :(

Tanking was a bit more stressful than ret, probably because when I tank I care more. Still, it was fun and I learned a bit more about the fight. The only annoyance was with divine plea: it refreshes when I attack, but sometimes I have no mobs. So, I'd steal one from the nearby DK now and then.

On our second to last attempt we had a very good attempt. Two deaths: a mage and resto shaman. It was after the wipe that we saw, if one of them had not died, we might have downed the dragon: less than 75k when we all died to the enrage. Final attempt was messier with more early deaths, and we still hit the enrage, but the boss was dead.

Excessive Awesome
When Razorscale died I felt something which I'd not felt in a long time: that weird rush when you pull your hair out and struggle and wipe and wipe and pay huge repairs and the boss dies and it just feels amazing. It's the feeling of beating a challenge, something which was lacking in Naxx.

I love Ulduar. My earlier fear has been removed. I look forward to dying and then making dead the whiniest robot ever.

The other excessive awesome was my tanking. Here's the situation: I wanted to switch my mainspec to ret, but hadn't had the chane. When Razorscale dropped a tanking belt I rolled need, but reconsidered due to my desire to move away from prot and some questions about my spec. Apparently I impressed the officers and the loot council voted for me to get the belt. This carried with it a pretty strong hint, nudge, and kick under the table that I should keep prot as my main. I guess I'm too good at things I don't want to do. No no, I'm not saying I don't want to tank, I'd just hoped to go ret and take all the DPS plate, but I crushed my own dreams.

In unrelated news my shaman has weird glyphs and a messed-up enhancement spec because I misread a talent and thought I'd be using lava burst as part of my rotation. Maybe I actually do, I wouldn't know, I'm even worse at my shaman than my paladin.